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2 Pulitzers for Times; Huffington Post and Politico Win

The New York Times won two Pulitzer Prizes on Monday for its reporting on Africa and for an investigative series on loopholes that allow the wealthiest Americans and corporations to avoid paying taxes. In a sign of the changing media landscape, two primarily online news outlets, The Huffington Post and Politico, won their first Pulitzer Prizes.

Also notable this year was the absence of prizes in two categories. The Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University in New York, which administers the awards, did not name a winner in the editorial writing category. More notably, the judges declined to name a winner for the highly coveted prize for fiction. The last time no winner was named for fiction was in 1977.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, which like many regional newspapers has struggled lately with a decline in print advertising revenue and changes in ownership, won the award for public service, among the most prestigious in journalism. The Inquirer’s winning series focused on the pervasive, child-against-child violence in Philadelphia’s schools.

“After all this newsroom has gone through in the last three or four years,” said The Inquirer’s editor, Stan Wischnowski. “Bankruptcy, being owned by hedge fund managers, the downsizing, so much that our staff had no control over. This is an absolute crowning achievement to their dedication and commitment to excellence.”

In the arts, the winners included Quiara Alegría Hudes, who took the prize for drama for her play “Water by the Spoonful,” and the late Manning Marable for “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” which won the history prize.

The Tuscaloosa News won in the breaking news category for its coverage of the deadly tornado that devastated that Alabama city last year. The judges cited the paper’s use of “social media as well as traditional reporting to provide real-time updates.”

In 2009 the Pulitzers, now in their 96th year, expanded to include online-only news sites, and the awards to Politico and The Huffington Post reflect the emerging power of Web-based journalism as it competes with legacy newspapers.

The two largest newspapers by Monday-to-Friday circulation in the United States — The Wall Street Journal and USA Today — did not win awards.

Politico, started by two veterans of The Washington Post, publishes a daily newspaper but is best known for its Web site. It won for Matt Wuerker’s cartoons, which highlighted partisan political divides.

“I work with old media — pen and ink on watercolor paper and watercolor — same as a cartoonist in the mid-1800s,” Mr. Wuerker said in a telephone interview.

The Huffington Post, started in 2005 by Arianna Huffington and Andrew Breitbart, among others, won the national reporting prize for a series on wounded veterans written by a longtime war correspondent, David Wood. Called “Beyond the Battlefield,” Mr. Wood’s work first appeared as a 10-part series online and was later expanded into an e-book.

Mr. Gettleman nominated himself for the award, and he beat out other Times reporters nominated for their coverage of the Japanese tsunami. While “some reporters might have felt his editors knew best” about the nomination, said Joseph Kahn, The Times’s foreign editor, “Jeffrey put himself forward for the Pulitzers — and for that, Jeffrey, bless your heart.”

But it was the absence of an award for fiction that was perhaps the most shocking result of the committee’s voting. A winning book can be an instant boost to sales and is one of the most closely watched awards in the publishing industry. Finalists in the category included “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson, “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell and “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace, who died in 2008.

Jonathan Galassi, the publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said he was “shellshocked” by the lack of a winner in fiction.

“It’s a missed opportunity,” he said. “Awards are very important to focus attention on books. So when one isn’t given, it’s a missed boat, and I’m sad about that.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 17, 2012, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: 2 Pulitzers for Times; Huffington Post and Politico Win; No Award in Fiction. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe